In ways I've tried to articulate elsewhere, the publication of Terryl Givens's By the Hand of Mormon in 2002 was a genuine event for Book of Mormon studies.1 When that book appeared, scholarly work on the Book of Mormon had been pursued in one form or another for more than a hundred years, had been undertaken by trained professionals for about half a century, and had been built around dedicated institutions for at least two decades. But there is a very real sense in which the publication of Givens's book was a founding event. It didn't overturn what had occurred in the twentieth century but gave such earlier work a real sense of itself while opening space for much new work. To whatever extent there is an identifiable field of Book of Mormon scholarship today, then it is because Givens surveyed the land and told us where previous planting...
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